Mean Girls, Tina Fey's stage adaptation of her own 2004 film, earned 12 Tony Award nominations in 2018, including Best Musical, with Fey writing the show's book.
This production closed on Broadway in 2020, so a New York trip won't include it — check for touring or licensed regional stagings instead.
The chain of adaptation here is longer than most people realize. Rosalind Wiseman's 2002 parenting book Queen Bees and Wannabes was a piece of social research about adolescent girls' hierarchies; Tina Fey turned it into the 2004 film; Fey then adapted her own screenplay into the stage book. Jeff Richmond, a Second City music director who scored Fey's television work, wrote the music, and Nell Benjamin, who had written lyrics for Legally Blonde, wrote the lyrics. Casey Nicholaw directed and choreographed.
The design answered the adaptation's central problem. The film's social order ran on notes passed in corridors and a physical burn book; by 2018 that world was a phone screen. Scott Pask's set was essentially a wall of LED panels, with video by Finn Ross and Adam Young, so scene changes happened as a feed refresh rather than a scenery move and the cafeteria could become a group chat between lines.
After a tryout at Washington's National Theatre in late 2017, it opened at the August Wilson Theatre in April 2018. It received twelve Tony nominations and won none — one of the larger shutouts in recent memory, in a season that belonged to The Band's Visit. Its final performance was on 11 March 2020, the day before Broadway closed; it played 833 performances and never resumed.
The adaptation's genuine achievement is structural rather than comic. The film is a satire with a moral tacked on; the musical gives the antagonist an interior life and a song, which changes what the ending can mean. Fey rewrote several of the film's most-quoted jokes rather than preserving them, a decision that irritated some of the audience the show was built to attract and is the main reason it plays better to people who did not arrive reciting the screenplay.
245 W 52nd St, New York, NY 10019 · Official site ↗
Mean Girls is a rock musical with a book by Tina Fey, lyrics by Nell Benjamin, and music by Jeff Richmond. It is based on the 2004 film by Mark Waters, which was also written by Fey and was in turn inspired by Rosalind Wiseman's 2002 book Queen Bees and Wannabes. The musical focuses on Cady Heron, a teenage girl who transfers to a public high school after being homeschooled her whole life in Africa. At school, she befriends outsiders Janis Sarkisian and Damian Hubbard who persuade her to infiltrate the "Plastics", a clique consisting of wealthy but insecure Gretchen Wieners, sweet but dimwitted Karen Smith, and "queen bee" Regina George.
This background summary is from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0. The editorial on this page is ours.